To A Lost Lover in Loss

Hi Joycey (grin). That works for me, I get up early, my fav time to make art, and I crash early, so early evening or day time is better. I’m often on the road with my camera, at the gym or at the coffee shop. I don’t have a living room to entertain, it’s all studio. I’m 70 now and in this building I’m called the baby. So all my friends are intergenerational, and a surprising number are in New York and Europe. Yay for the internet.

All my ex’s are narcissists. I was attracted to their love bombing then they undervalued me and split, typically. The consequences of being an orphan, addicted to love and approval, which I’ve written books on. So I don’t have kids or family and really can’t relate to not living in the inner city and hanging out at the coffee shop meeting strange people and sleeping with them. Also a book subject. I tend to teach and lecture to strangers, which they seem to like as aspiring artists mostly. I love apartment living as I don’t have to do maintenance, I did the homeowner lifestyle for 10 years but I find it isolating, not to mention expensive. It’s why I own a Toyota Rav4. It’s built like a Klingon Battle Cruiser and doesn’t require constant maintenance for the first million kilometers.

In the 80’s I moved to Victoria with the typical Golden Retriever and a typical narcissist nurse who typically got bored, met a rich engineer and stopped coming home at night. Ross Chapman called me up and offered me a serious well paying job in Calgary dispatching at Yellow 300 cars so I came back. Eventually I went to Art School for 6 years, earned 2 degrees then taught there and Mount Royal for 10 more off and on. As well as working at long term care homes doing art as therapy with folks with terminal brain disease, the same disease as my wife had at the time. Our relationship ended in 2000 and I haven’t been in a long term relationship since. One lady I dated said “you don’t have a house or even a couch” as if what I find satisfying and my empathy is measured by a couch or a house. The purpose of life is satisfaction.

I stopped drugs and alcohol in 1988 because the family therapy began to make sense to me and I didn’t hurt so much. I became a rational emotive behavioral therapist REBT due to the amount of work it took to feel better https://www.rebtnetwork.org/library/ideas.html

So I have a satisfying life with some pain in the ass inconveniences like stroke recovery, but I’ve recovered to the point of only seeing the doc once a year and exercising a lot to create range of motion and pain relief. Your husband Donny is my role model for working around physical disability. I once taught him to play guitar after he had an elbow shot off from coming out of a bank robbery. I really love him for showing me how to deal with difficulty. One of my favorite teachers. That’s why I like you as well, I like teachers.

Soon I will look like Daniel Craig in James Bond. Folks at the gym put on their orgasm/taking a massive shit face when exercising. Fascinating. I really like people.

I sold cars in Victoria, but was fired for not lying. A sin I’ve been rejected for a few times. It’s good for weeding out the users, I only relate long term to people I find satisfying. I have a friend, Carla, an art teacher in New York, who lives with her architect husband. I fell in love with their cat and he became the subject of videos so I could learn to make them. Here is one of him time travelling to different artist friends through art history and Carla riding her bike also through time to bring him home for supper. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y3cJw0_rkZehmUIWWo1qNzFMfUZ2xX7S/view?usp=sharing

So, as you can see I also have gone through life changing loss. Several times. My therapist Albert Ellis the foremost psychologist of the last century (here are some of his books in epub https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MAc64uxmpjJ82W-OKRUDvbMyr7w3oaZU?usp=sharing ) offered me this: If you lose and arm or a leg (I lost both) do everything you can to deal with it, in my case that was family therapy sometimes, physiotherapy at others, then IGNORE IT, and focus on your choices for satisfactions, you may not have as many choices but you still have some.

So in the last 6 years I have written and published 13 books, made countless videos and digital art and go to the gym so much that young women swoon (ya right). But you get the idea. Stay away from religious grief counsellors that shame you inevitably for not finding purpose in loss. There is no purpose. The purpose in life is satisfaction. Loss is a pain in the ass. Like any normal life major event you get over it eventually, and the best way is to seek professional help to deal with it, because it helps when in pain, and then ignore it and focus on satisfactions. When I was in hospital for a year I wrote my first book on a tablet in the coffee shop with my left hand and spent 300 a month on internet access so I could watch lesbian porn, because the women are affectionate which I found/find satisfying and a turn on.

I found I like poetry. Here is my new fav:

L. L. Zeiger

Misconceptions

For so many years, Clive Barnes,
I thought your name was Olive.
All the things I was reading in books
and did not say to anyone
and could not say to anyone —
How I blushed with shame
when caught in my misconceptions,
like being seen masturbating.

Now that I am wiser
I find everything confusing
even when I pronounce it perfectly.
A simple statement like “Void where prohibited” —
How shall I read it?
How shall I think it?
I want to take it as an imperative
and pee on the floor of the public library.

Take Care Joycie

Jerald with a J (or Jerry if you say it with affection)